Dancing Lessons

by Olive Senior

  Even Miss Pitt-Grainger came out to our vegetable garden from time to time to offer instructions, for it turned out that the kitchen garden she started at her school had produced so prolifically under her guidance, it could have fed nations. Though I was sure the poor plants, like everything else under her care, sprouted from sheer fright. A visit to our plot was about the only time she went outside the shelter of the lounge, as it was in shouting distance of the kitchen for ice cubes and limes for her gin and tonic, the gin stashed in the capacious carpetbag that never left her side, jostling with the needlepoint and crossword and pencil which she never let out of her sight.

  On these occasions she wore what could only be construed as her gardening costume. Her massive legs white and hairy beneath a pair of tailored khaki shorts that bulged in the wrong places, despite the pleats, nicely turned down white socks, and sparkling white tennis shoes that instantly turned nasty from the wet soil, as Winston always seemed to need to turn on the hose for some watering as soon as she hove into view. A sleeveless white cotton blouse from which flabby arms protruded and a stiff and spotless Jippi Jappa hat with a fluttering blue ribbon completed the ensemble, so she looked more like a dry-land tourist than a formidable moulder of thousands of young minds. Never mind, she had come to mould ours, and Mr. Bridges and I would spend the next fifteen minutes or so rolling our eyes at each other. She didn’t stay long, because she could not abide the sun, but she would continue talking as she walked off, snatches of words coming back to us fainter and fainter on the breeze as she disappeared inside to her favourite pastimes.

  All of this interest, of course, is because of Mr. Bridges. Had I been working there alone with Winston, few would have bothered to notice our efforts. Or perhaps I should say the interest is in Mr. Bridges and me. That combination is as incongruous to them, I’m sure, as a tuna cactus and a rose growing together in the same bed. No guesses as to which of us is which.

  45

  THERE MUST HAVE BEEN so much talk about me and Mr. Bridges, even my daughter heard about it, for she teased me the next time she came around. The teasing, not the knowledge of my growing friendship with Mr. Bridges, surprised me. This was a side of her I had not seen before. I wonder how much more I don’t know about my Celia.

  It’s as if everything around me is in some sort of flux, and the changes I am feeling are not just in myself but in other people as well. Or perhaps it is my own changing life that is altering my perception of everyone and everything. I know it isn’t my change of life, for I went through that a long time ago. Suddenly I feel I am on shifting ground.

  Take the case of Miss Pitt-Grainger. A woman who delights in alienating everyone with her superior airs and attitudes. And yet, when she collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital, we all felt, I think, genuinely concerned. When the ambulance pulled out from the porte cochere, it was as if the little group of us standing there moved closer together, to prevent the hand of time from plucking the next one from our midst. Matron kept us up-to-date with bulletins from the hospital and soon Miss Pitt-Grainger was home, recuperating. She had had some sort of seizure and fallen, breaking her right wrist. On returning to Ellesmere Lodge, she was confined to bed. But it never occurred to me not to visit her and offer my help, for that is how it had always been with me and my neighbours at home.

  I was amazed to find her room full of flowers, and at first I thought they were from some of her ex-students, many now famous women, as she liked to boast. But when later I offered to freshen them up and looked at the cards, I saw they were all from residents of the home. Even the Pancake Sisters, her most ferocious critics and who had had to endure her a lot longer than I, had sent her a dozen yellow roses. Like many of the other residents, they came to visit. I passed by one day to find the sick woman and Ruby nattering away—in Spanish! Languages, it seems, had been Miss Pitt-Grainger’s special subjects.

  Although Miss Pitt-Grainger had always appeared larger than life, lying in the bed she seemed shrunken, her face hollow and grey. I realized she was much older than I thought. She was anxious about how long she would have to stay in bed. I understood her concern. It was one all the residents shared, the fear that the day would come when they would no longer be able to stay at Ellesmere Lodge. I excluded myself, for I still wanted to leave. Ellesmere Lodge catered only to those old people who were able-bodied and capable of taking care of themselves. When they could no longer do so, they had to move on. Since I’d been there, two residents had sunk into increasing senility and had disappeared from our midst. I wondered where Miss Pitt-Grainger would move to. Unlike most of the other folk, who had younger family members or friends to take care of arrangements, she seemed to have no one.

  I suddenly felt a wave of sympathy for her that I had never thought possible, the fact that here was someone who seemed even less connected than I was. I asked about her family and whether she would like me to write some letters for her, but she said there was no one. Except for some distant cousins in England, she had lost touch. She was one of those who had come out to the colonies, in her case fresh out of university in the post-war years, youthful and optimistic. The experience had ruined her forever. She had never returned to live in England and yet was never able to settle. She had moved from one tropical country to another, her visits back home growing fewer and her connections becoming less and less. She would probably die here, a place she had never really put down roots. She was as much a castaway as Heathcliff.

  I could see that over the years she had accumulated little, for I knew how to read those signs, having been there myself. Her room revealed a few clothes, some books, a painting or two, some photographs. I cut her nails and trimmed her hair, which was falling into her eyes—it was pure white, dead straight, thin and silky. It reminded me of Miss Celia’s. I used to think Miss Pitt-Grainger refused to avail herself of any of the services offered at the Home because she was too mean, but now, looking around her room, seeing the dark skeins of worry crisscrossing her face, I realized it was because she was too poor.

  I can’t say I grew to love Miss Pitt-Grainger, but I did feel ashamed of some of the things I had thought about her, and even about the Pancake Sisters, whom I considered selfish and shallow. They are all of that still, but they are also kind and generous. They couldn’t have been nicer or more helpful to the sick woman, Ruby especially smuggling ice and lime for at least one drink a day against doctor’s orders. Since they were probably also seeing her room for the first time, they must have had the same thoughts as me, for presents kept appearing—soaps, body lotions and powders, books and magazines and classical music CDS for her little player.

  I was there the day Ruby arrived with a present in a large white box tied with a bright pink ribbon. “From the three of us,” she announced as she dramatically untied it. I almost laughed out loud when she unfolded the tissue paper and held up a kimono in bright salmon pink silk splashed all over with green and blue flowers. Just the kind of thing Ruby herself would wear, but a more incongruous gift for the Pitt-Bull I could not imagine. To my surprise, the patient looked pleased, despite her protests, and flushed as pink as the present when Ruby insisted she try it on then and there. She helped her out of her washed-out plain cotton housecoat and into the new. Every day after that I would come and find Miss Pitt-Grainger wrapped up in this luxurious garment, looking like a somewhat bedraggled kitten.

  Miss Pitt-Grainger did get better. Her sickness softened but did not alter her. She is as autocratic as ever. But somehow, the beam of her critical eye is not as piercing, her verbal blows no longer sting, perhaps because she herself seems to have grown smaller, more fragile. I also think my rosier view on things is a result of Mr. Bridges’ benign influence, like some sweet anodyne working its way through me.

  46

  I THINK THE SECRET of Mr. Bridges’ charm is that he is the most uncomplicated of human beings. This is the reason everyone finds it so easy to like him. Unlike some people, there are no hidden edges or dark corners in his psy
che, no quicksand or murderous shoals or dangerous waters, though I keep looking for them, for that is what I’m used to in people. He is even-tempered, polite, considerate, never raises his voice, and never seems to get into a fuss about anything. Over the months of our acquaintance, I have learnt that he had a happy childhood, enjoyed his boarding school where he excelled at sports and mathematics, enjoyed his time at a Canadian university, loved his job, had a good marriage, enjoyed a good relationship with his children, and still has a wide circle of friends and many activities. His only regret now is that he allowed his children to persuade him to give up his house. After his second heart attack, they insisted that he should not stay there alone. The choices were to go and live with one of them in the United States or move into a residential home. There was no question of his going abroad to live, he says, so he chose Ellesmere Lodge. At the time he had been willing to make the move, to have someone come and take care of all the arrangements, as his daughter had, in order to move into a place where all his daily wants would be met. But now he was feeling healthy again, he was wishing himself back in the house he had lived in for thirty years. He missed the vines on his veranda, the fruit trees he had planted, his fish pond, the cool breeze blowing down the valley at night, and the view of the mountains. He was glad that he had dug his heels in and refused to sell the place; a cousin lived there now and took care of things. So the possibility of going back was always open.

  The way he talks about it makes me realize that this is the only thing that bothers him, the indecision he feels about the house. I marvel that he seems otherwise to have lived a life without regret. How is that possible? Sometimes he says, “It would be easy to go back to the house if I had someone to go with me.” He never says anything direct, and I am not presumptuous enough to think a hint is being thrown at me. I have lived in hope only twice in my life and it never worked out, so I’m not going to develop new longings now, though in my insane moments I find the idea appealing and I fantasize a bit about me and Mr. Bridges in his house, in cosy domesticity, until I summon up enough common sense to clobber the image.

  Yet, perhaps a hint is being thrown, for Mr. Bridges is one of those men who left everything domestic up to his wife, and she not only ran the household but dealt with all matters pertaining to the physical property as well. He merely signed the cheques for the carpenters and masons, plumbers and decorators, he told me; he had no idea how or why they came or went. His vegetable garden was his only claim to domesticity. She was the kind of wife, he said, who even laid out his clothes for him to wear each morning.

  I have to wonder at that, for he seems to manage perfectly on his own. Mr. Bridges’ looks are a mirror of his personality. He is compact but well built, no stoop in his posture even now, for though he no longer plays sports, he is disciplined at using the exercise bike in his room and does his push-ups regularly. He has a rather large head and big ears, which I like, but his other features I would describe as regular, an attrac tive rather than a handsome face that has aged well, his eyes that might have been dark brown lightened with age to the colour of his skin. I suspect he’s the kind of man who is more handsome in old age than in youth, and in my more playful moments I think of Mr. Bridges as a charming little brown mouse. But that would make me a cat. It is when I am near him that I am conscious of the enormous size to which I have grown, and I have vowed to cut back on my eating. Not as hard as it sounds, as the intense desire for food which came upon me when I first arrived here gets less and less the longer I stay. In truth, without any great effort on my part, I am getting back to where I was. I’m now working backwards in my wardrobe.

  I think of time spent with Mr. Bridges as a way of reducing many things to more manageable proportions, including my anxieties. He has such a calming way of looking at life. Even Winston seems tamed under his influence, for he is so much more amenable now to gardening work. On his own initiative, he has forked up several more beds for planting. The fact that the land, the seeds, the plants, the tools, fertilizers, the sprays, even the water is provided by others, and that his labour alone can yield such bounty, must strike him as a good bargain, for much of the harvest seems now to be going to his baby-mothers.

  But it is to Mr. Bridges that I attribute this tenderness that is taking root in me. To tell the truth, I am afraid of it. I don’t know if I was tender with my children. I have never thought of it. I mothered them, but I don’t know what that meant beyond looking after their needs. I don’t know if I had time to be tender, they came so fast, three before I was of legal age, and I had not just the children and the house to look after but the fields as well, the goats, the chickens, the eggs we sold. I didn’t do it all by myself, I always had someone to help in the fields, but I was the one who had to see that everything got done. I sewed all our clothes, mended them, stitched sheets from flour bags and salted down beef when we got some, for we were awfully poor the first few years since neither of us had brought anything to the table except for the land and the little house that he had fixed up. Everything was cut and carve and worrying about the next meal. I don’t remember he was at home much, even at the start, and I was too timid to ask where he went though, my God, how I longed to know. How I longed to turn him inside out, know everything about him. And how he twisted and turned, slipped away from me so that I could never truly say I had caught him.

  It was an uneven yoke, one he never wanted. It was his mother who expected us to get married. She wanted all her sons married. She thought they needed to settle down. Though her eldest and only married son, John, was hardly a shining example of being settled. I also thought she believed that Sam had wronged me and should pay for what he had done, marriage being the only possible payment.

  While I was living with her, I don’t know what kind of conversations she was having with Sam, but she was writing to the Richardses from time to time asking them to give their permission for me to marry, for of course I was well under legal age. They did not reply, but she never stopped trying.

  Things only came to a head because of that married John attacking me one day. I was alone in the house, Ma D having left that morning to accompany her daughter, Jean, to town, I don’t know what for, and Miss Gem had gone along too. I don’t know where Mass Ephraim was, I didn’t see him around, and undoubtedly John had not either, but he is the one who came running when he heard my screams.

  I was so angry that day that I could easily have killed this man myself, and little Mass Ephraim, who must have been in his sixties at the time, would probably have done so, had John not been so much younger and stronger that he easily disarmed him of the cutlass he came flying through the door with. But it was enough to prevent him from carrying through with his intentions. Before leaving, he looked at the old man on the floor where he had flung him, after the cutlass, and I could still hear the sound of that body striking the wall.

  “Oh Ephraim, Ephraim, Ephraim,” he said, shaking his head and laughing, “I would never have taken you for such a gallant. Well done, my man. We’ll knock back a quart in celebration. Later.”

  He had the nerve to give a V for Victory sign and smile at me before leaving. But I could see the angry purple scratches that were breaking out on his cheeks where I had scratched him and the redness of his ears.

  The door slammed behind him. Mass Ephraim got up very slowly, as if in shock, walked over and leaned against that same door, and then, to my immense alarm, burst into tears and sank slowly down onto his heels, holding his hands over his face and howling. I stood helpless, trying to murmur words of comfort. When his sobs finally ceased, he let his hands drop and held up his face as if waiting for the air to dry his tears, and then he just got up and took up his cutlass, as if everything had returned to normal. He smiled sadly at me and shook his head.

  “Miss G,” he said, “you don’t know, young miss, you just don’t know what this house pass through. Is only because of the Missis why me and Gem stay. As long as breath in mi body I wi’ stay with Missis. But I pray you
don’t tarry here long.” And with that he went through the door. Then he popped his head back in and shook his cutlass at me. “Don’t worry, little miss, me and the ‘las still here. We and Massa God will protek you.”

  Left alone, I backed into a chair and eased myself down. My body was shaking uncontrollably. From fright, from anger, from relief. When I had calmed down I began to feel proud of myself too, for I had inflicted some slight damage on the beast, as I thought of him, and an even greater wound to his pride, no matter his taunt to Mass Ephraim.

  Now that I had escaped serious hurt, I realized what really annoyed me was how he had crept up on me and frightened me, ripped a strip off my privacy, seen a part of me no one ever saw. I had been sitting at the sewing machine in a corner of the covered porch overlooking the backyard where nothing moved except a hen and her chicks, stitching a new dress that Ma D had helped me cut out, my feet working away at the treadle and singing loudly to myself. I thought I was alone. What was I singing? That same song my father taught me, one I never forgot and sang to myself sometimes, but only when I was sure I was alone, moving my upper body to the rhythm as I was doing now as I fed the material through.

  If you don’t have love songs to fit my key

  Baby don’t you sing your blues to me.

  That’s YOUR RED WAGON,

  So just keep dragging YOUR RED WAGON along.

  I was in my own private world, one that no one else had ever seen, so it was embarrassment more than fright I felt when I suddenly heard steps behind me. I stopped singing instantly and before I could turn to look, I felt two arms kneading my shoulders and a hot breath on the back of my neck. It was strange that I never thought it was Sam. From the first touch, I felt it was dangerous and dirty. Before I realized who it was, I screamed with fright and tried to jump out of the chair. But by then he had already moved and was on his knees burying his head in my belly, his hands kneading my breasts, hurting me, unbuttoning my blouse.